"Kanban is basically keeping everything on sticky notes. We can actually do that in the graphical user interface," said Kelly Emo, who runs the HP product marketing team for ALM. "In ALM, you see the yellow stickies, and you click on them and all the information -- the user story, the outstanding defects, the code -- is exposed for you."

The Kanban interface is one of a number of enhancements to its ALM suite that HP released Tuesday, all in support of speeding the development time of applications. Thanks to Google and Facebook, "business users are expecting to not have to wait six or nine months for new capabilities," Emo said.

First developed by David Anderson, the focuses on making small, incremental changes and visualizing the process workflow. An increasing number of development teams are finding Kanban to work well in an . HP has noticed "an uptake in the agile methodology, as organizations [try] to deliver capabilities much faster than they did before," Emo said.

HP has embedded a Kanban interface into its HP Agile Accelerator, an ALM add-on, so its interface can more closely resemble a Kanban process, Emo said. ALM is HP's software for shepherding new software through the entire development cycle, including requirements management, performance testing and developer management.

This feature will allow developers to form a virtual team from geographically dispersed participants. "You can have a virtual agile meeting, using ALM to tie everyone together," Emo said.